Who drives home

2022.

The arrangement was made standing up in the car park, in about four minutes, and was never revisited.

Vilma drove out in the morning because she wakes up well. Edson drove back because she does not see properly at night and has never been embarrassed to say so. Petrol was split by bank transfer at the end of the month, with no spreadsheet, and the car was hers because his had a clutch that was going to last another six months and lasted three years.

They both worked at the same plastic packaging firm, in a unit out past the ring road. She was in finance, he was in maintenance. They lived two kilometres apart on the same side of the city, which in a place that size is practically being related.

Ninety minutes in the morning. Ninety at night. Five days a week.

That comes to three hours a day inside a silver hatchback with weak air conditioning. Nobody works that number out before accepting a lift.

The way out and the way back are different journeys, and anybody who has not done that run will not believe it.

On the way out they were freshly awake, in a hurry, and afraid of being late. They said little and what they said was practical: traffic, the meeting, lunch, whether the boss was coming in. Radio on a news station. She drove with both hands on the wheel.

The way back was another thing. The day had already happened, neither of them had anything left to protect, and the stretch between the toll and the junction seizes up from six until eight every single day, which turns ninety minutes into a hundred and twenty often enough that it stopped being a surprise in the second month.

On the way back the radio went to music. He drove with one hand.

Across four years the two of them discussed, in that car: his divorce, her mother, money, his son who does not speak to him, her thyroid, religion twice, politics never.

2023.

That was the year the routine turned into a habit, which are different things.

A routine is something you do every day. A habit is your body knowing before you do. By 2023 she was parking in the same spot on his street without looking for it, he had a copy of the key, and both of them knew by heart the exact point on the dual carriageway where the radio signal drops and comes back.

It was also the year the passenger seat stopped being the passenger seat and became his seat.

That has objective symptoms. He started keeping a charger in the door pocket. She stopped moving her bag off the seat before he got in, because he was already picking it up and putting it in the back himself. The rear-view mirror settled at an angle that worked for both of them, which is a thing that does not exist, because people are different heights, and it settled there anyway.

Nothing happened in 2023. I am recording that because it reads as though something did.

2024.

In May the main road was closed by an overturned lorry, at twenty to seven, with the two of them already on it.

Anyone who knows that run knows there is no good diversion. There is the bad diversion, which is the old road, single carriageway, no hard shoulder, a hundred and ten kilometres instead of sixty-two.

They joined the old road at ten past seven and reached their side of the city at twenty to midnight.

Four and a half hours. Single carriageway, in the dark, behind lorries, with a twenty-minute stop at a roadside services that had pasties and did not have a working ladies'.

He was the one driving, because it was the way back.

At about half twelve, already in the city, he parked on her street and neither of them got out.

The engine stayed off for fifty-one minutes, and she knows the number because she looked at the clock on the dash when he switched it off and looked again when he switched it on.

That car has a bench seat in the front, which is terrible, and a handbrake in the middle, which is worse.

None of that prevented anything.

The next morning she collected him at ten past six, as always, and drove out, as always.

The two of them talked about the overturned lorry, which had been in the news, and about an invoice that had been wrong since April.

It happened four more times that year, always on the way back, always with the car stationary, and never once with either of them calling it anything. There were no messages outside the hours of the journey. There was no meeting anywhere else. Not once did either of them go upstairs.

There was a limit, and the limit was the car door, and it was kept with a strictness that anybody outside would find absurd and that made complete sense to the two of them.

2025.

In March the company moved the operation to a unit on the other side of the city.

There was no drama at all. Her run became forty minutes on a different road, and his became an hour and a half in a direction where the lift does not work for anybody.

The last morning run was on a Friday, the twenty-eighth of March. Neither of them marked the date as the last one, because on the Friday you still think something can be sorted out.

He bought a car in April, on a forty-eight month agreement.

They are both still at the same firm, they message almost every day about invoices and work orders, and they see each other about four times a year at the general meetings, where they talk perfectly normally.

The old road is still there, single carriageway and no hard shoulder, used every time the main road seizes up, by about eight hundred people a day who have no idea at all what happened on it one night in May.